"what practice?"

We are sorry to hear of your difficulty in getting through to the Practice to make an appointment for your flu vaccination and we do not deny that our phone lines were particularly busy last week. However we are here and working harder than ever to cope as best we can with the challenges of this stage of the Pandemic. We received our first delivery of flu vaccinations on 10th September and at the time of writing this response we have vaccinated 953 patients and have booked appointments for a further 1216 patients. Last week we took over 1800 calls, 69% of which were answered in under 60 seconds. We also responded to 59 eConsultations, provided 2451 appointments and signed 2110 prescriptions. We appreciate this does not make your experience any better but at this difficult time we are delivering services differently to try to keep patients and staff safe. We are doing this by offering telephone, video and online consultations where appropriate and limiting face to face consultations to those that cannot be managed remotely. This is putting greater pressure on our 20 telephone lines and so we are encouraging patients to order medication and review test results online and to use eConsultations, which are available through our website at http://www.nortonmedicalcentre.nhs.uk/, as an alternative way to contact the Practice. We also have a letter box outside of the main car park entrance that can be used to drop in prescription requests and notes. Most of all we are relying on our patients having patience and understanding as we also cope with unpredictable staffing levels due to illness, isolation and quarantine and the additional workload as a result of COVID safety measures and infection control, which reduces appointment capacity.

If you would like to fill in an eConsultation with your name, date of birth, address and a note to say you have been unable to contact us to make an appointment for a flu vaccination or to pop a note to that effect in our post box a member of staff will contact you.